


It Takes a Luminescent View

by Cake_Raptor



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Anne is generally appalled, Canon-Typical Cannibalism, Canon-Typical Violence, Dan is generally awesome, Drug Use, Eddie and Venom accidentally trip balls, Eddie and Venom eat something they shouldn't have, Established Eddie Brock/Venom Symbiote, Fluff, Gen, Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Venom Symbiote (Marvel), It's generally just silly, Psychotropic Drugs, Venom Symbiote Loves Eddie Brock, hurt/comfort if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-13
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-13 12:00:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29401617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cake_Raptor/pseuds/Cake_Raptor
Summary: Eddie and Venom decide to take down a drug-dealing ring. They proceed to accidentally eat something they shouldn't have and trip balls. Anne and Dan come to the rescue.
Relationships: Dan Lewis/Anne Weying, Eddie Brock & Dan Lewis & Anne Weying & Venom Symbiote, Eddie Brock & Venom Symbiote, Eddie Brock/Venom Symbiote
Comments: 14
Kudos: 79
Collections: Venom Big Bang 2020





	It Takes a Luminescent View

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from the Fair to Midland song Vice/Versa.  
> Art by the amazing OldToadWoman!  
> Thank you to cupidsbow for putting together this Big Bang!  
> TW: Accidental drug use, violence.

Up until this point, Eddie and Venom hadn’t thought that this had been going too badly. Now though? They were all too aware that that was not the case.

Eddie struggled to focus; the streetlights seemed to be bleeding and smearing across his field of view. He tottered down the empty street. Thank  _ fuck _ it was so late.

**... Eddie… Don’t feel so good…** Venom groaned in his head.

Eddie patted the ropes of black draped across his body. His symbiote was having trouble staying inside his skin. They oozed in slow motion down his shoulders like sun-warmed tar.

“It’ll be okay… I’m sure of it, love…” he replied, trying to sound soothing and confident, though that was the furthest thing from how he actually felt. He hitched Venom higher up on his shoulders. “We just need to get to Anne and Dan’s. They’ll help us. We’ll be okay.”

Venom’s answering moan seemed to dance across the octaves.

...

It had seemed simple enough. Lately, gangs had been dealing drugs more aggressively in the Tenderloin, pushing cocaine, crack, meth and heroin. Eddie generally turned a blind eye to drug dealers. Who was he to judge if someone was trying to make ends meet by dealing a little LSD or a few mushrooms? Or, in the old days, some weed.

This was different though. These were hard drugs. They’d get you hooked. They’d eat people up and leave them desperate husks, stripped down to only think about how to get their next fix. These drug dealers were going to hurt and kill a lot of people, who were going to hurt a lot more people in turn. Eddie couldn’t stand by and do nothing. So he and his other had started hunting them down.

The gang had been using homeless people to stash most of their drugs when they were actively dealing, so if the cops caught any of the dealers, their jail sentences would be short as they would only be holding a tiny amount of drugs. The rest would be secreted away in the belongings of one of San Francisco’s legion of homeless. Eddie didn’t blame those people. The dealers would pay them a few bucks for the help and they always, always needed the money in gentrified San Francisco.

Venom had hunted several of those street dealers down, but there were always more. What they needed to do was take out the ringleaders.

So Eddie did some digging, spoke to his contacts and learned that a new shipment of drugs was due to arrive at the docks in the wee hours in a few days. Well, the shipment would actually probably arrive in the day, but it wouldn’t be collected out of the shipping containers it had been smuggled in until the small hours of the morning. It sounded cooler anyways. He’d choose the more interesting phrasing option if he was going to write about it.

Not that he fucking  _ could _ . In his effort to keep suspicions away from his nocturnal activities, he hadn’t been writing about anything he and his other dealt with lately. That wasn’t to say that he  _ never _ used the abilities granted to him by his alien body mate to get intel on something, because of course he fucking did. Eddie would be  _ nuts _ if he didn’t use every advantage possible in the competitive world of journalism.

Unfortunately though, he’d been writing a lot of fluff and filler lately. It was easy enough, was always wanted and it paid the bills. But it grated against his idealistic core like a knife on porcelain. At least he was doing  _ something _ positive with V. If he didn’t have the symbiote to go engage in vigilantism with, he’d be screaming from the crap he was writing these past few months.

So now they were lurking around the docks. Stacks of steel shipping crates stretched up to the velvety night sky in red, white, yellow and blue.

**Would be better if it was foggy. Or raining.** Eddie’s other commented silently as they climbed a pyramid of the containers.

_ Why? _ Eddie asked, wrapped up in the comforting, warm pressure of the symbiote. He loved the feeling. He felt nearly invulnerable, feeling the raw power and heightened senses the symbiote gave him.

**Eddie.** they sighed.  **Haven’t you heard of atmosphere? Would be much cooler.**

_ We’re in the deserted docks in the middle of the night to go kill drug-dealing gangsters. How much more atmosphere do you want, babe? _

**Just saying.** Venom replied, a little reproachfully.

_ Aww, don’t be that way, babe. The next time we do something like this, I’ll make sure to tell the weather person to schedule something with appropriate ambiance. _

The symbiote growled out loud.  **“You are making fun of me.”**

_ Yup. Be quiet though. Sound’ll carry easily here. _

**_Fine_ ** **. Not off the hook for teasing me though.**

_ Yeah, yeah… you’ll punish me later, I know the drill. _ Eddie replied, smiling to himself. Venom liked dishing out teasing, but they couldn’t take it.

**Hmph. Not as much fun when you look forward to it. Wait. I sense people below us.**

_ Yeah. Me too. Think it’s them? _

Venom curled out their obscenely long tongue, strings of drool dripping off its scarlet length. They tasted the soft breeze. They didn’t need to voice their surety. Through their bond, Eddie could taste the sulphur note of gunpowder and the acrid smoke of cigarettes. They had to be close.

Bunching their powerful thighs, they prepared to leap to the next stack of containers. Landing softly, making sure to keep their sharp claws from clicking on the steel, they peered down over the edge into a wider open area amongst the containers. Despite their bulk and penchant for crashing around, Venom could move as soundlessly as a cat when they wanted to. Below them was a lone container, painted bright yellow and streaked in russet. A group of people were clustered around, staring with a distinctly paranoid air. They didn’t look up, however. So many humans never did.

**Eight of them. Think they all have guns?**

_ Oh yeah. Look at the way they stand. They’re nervous and keep touching where they have their guns holstered to reassure themselves. _

Two were struggling to open the door while the rest watched. Flakes of rust finally crumbled and the hinges screeched open.

Venom bared their arsenal of teeth and cringed, skin shivering. It  _ hurt _ .

Thankfully, once the doors got past the first little bit, there were no more screeching sounds.

**Now?** the symbiote asked, tensing.

_ No. Not yet. They’re still on edge. _

Settling down onto their belly with a theatrical sigh, Venom watched as the gangsters dragged out a crate. Putting the end of a crowbar under the lid, they ripped it open with a splintering sound. A cardboard box was lifted out and balanced on the corner of the crate. Then that too was opened. Inside were small, paper wrapped rectangles.

**Is that what I think it is?** Venom asked, lifting their head up off their arms.

“Where’s the stuff?” asked one of the gangsters in a raspy voice.

“Underneath. It’s not in all of them. There are a few legit crates in case Border Patrol wanted to search this.”

Venom squinted.  **It is! It’s chocolate!**

_ Shh… I can’t hear anything when you do that. _ Eddie said.

More chocolate bars were lifted out and stacked to the side. Beneath lay a seemingly identical row. However, these seemed to be what they were looking for. The wrapper was torn off to reveal a white rectangle, wrapped tightly in plastic and tape. More and more boxes were opened and the pile grew.

_ That is an absolute fuckload of cocaine. Did they have all of Columbia shipped here? _

**_That_ ** **is a fuckload of** **_chocolate_ ** **! Eddie! Chocolate!**

_ Yeah, yeah. Drug dealers first though, ‘kay? _

**Do you think we can eat these ones?** his other asked with a sly tilt of their head.

After running afoul of the police, Hydra, Captain America and Falcon, Eddie and Venom hadn’t been eating nearly as many heads lately. They mostly kept a lower profile, scaring the shit out of those they didn’t deem bad enough to eat. Maybe sending them home with a few stripes to show that they had crossed San Francisco’s lethal protector, but that was generally all. Those that were the worst of the worst, they  _ did _ eat, taking great pains to dispose of the leftovers.

_ Yeah. The harbour’s right there. The sharks can get a snack too. _

Venom cracked their jaws in a wide, pointy smile, drooling ropes of slime. They sized up the gangsters arrayed below. The criminals were too engrossed in unwrapping the shipment of smuggled drugs to notice the gleaming black alien lurking above and behind them. Venom selected one that was standing slightly further away than the rest as their first victim.

A tentacle lashed out, wrapping around his head entirely before yanking him up into the darkness. He didn’t even have time to gasp. His head was delivered right into their slavering maw. A crunch and then he was no more. One down. Seven more to go.

Venom prowled around, searching for an opening to snatch their next victim up. Alas, everyone else was standing too close together. They shrugged their broad shoulders and leaped in.

They landed on one gangster, flattening him to the ground with the machine gun snap of ribs. There was a split second where everyone was frozen in shock, before they drew their weapons to fire at the symbiote.

Venom curled their thin lips in a derisive sneer; the bullets from the pistols merely slapped into their mass to ping harmlessly on the ground. They lunged forward, swiping out a long arm tipped in lethally sharp claws at the nearest human. She backpedalled frantically away, but not fast enough. She spun to the side and fell, clutching at the ropes of intestines bulging from her abdomen.

“Kill it! Kill it!” screamed someone.

Venom decided to take him out next. Mustn’t let them try and get organized. Blind panic was much easier to work with. They leaped.

“Aim for the- _ gurk _ !” he shouted before Venom wrapped their hand around his throat. For good measure they also grabbed the next nearest gangster around the neck. The symbiote began to unhinge their jaws in preparation to bite off some heads when a spray of bullets peppered up their back. They paused. The lead slugs did nothing, of course, but they couldn’t ignore this affrontory. Venom whirled and lunged, still holding the two gangsters in their fists, and sank their razor-sharp teeth into the flank of the man who shot them. Their teeth slipped easily through jacket, shirt and skin to mesh together, taking a chunk of flesh out nearly the size of a bowling ball. They swallowed the meat, the denim from the jacket catching a little on the barbed surface of their tongue.

**“Nasty. Don’t think** **_that_ ** **jacket was ever washed… We shall just have to get that taste out with something much more delectable, won’t we?”** they purred, eyeing the cyanotic gangsters in their grip. They licked their chops.

The last two gangsters tried to bolt after realizing they were the only ones left alive, but Venom threw a still-twitching corpse and knocked them both over.

_ Ha! That was a good shot, wasn’t it? _

Venom prowled over to their last two victims as they struggled out from under the bleeding corpse and pinned each to the ground with a thick tentacle.

**“Oh yes, and we shall reward ourselves with more brains.”** They stretched their jaws wide once more.

Afterwards, Venom grumbled a little about the clean up. They were full and wanted nothing more than to go home to cuddle up to Eddie and watch a movie as their host slept.

**“Stupid police. Can’t they see we are doing them a favour? We killed all these drug dealers. Now all they have to do is collect all the drugs and pose for the news and take credit for what we did without ever getting in danger. We just did the hard work.** **_They_ ** **should have to clean up after us.”**

Eddie replied,  _ It won’t take long. The ocean’s right there. _

**“Hmph.”** They hefted a carcass in each hand and hurled them into the water with an enormous splash. This was a really half-assed way to get rid of the bodies. Bits would wash up distressingly soon since they weren’t weighed down or anything, but by then the plentiful sharks of the Bay would have disguised most of the wounds with their own bites.

Once all the bodies were dumped in the water, Venom hummed thoughtfully and sidled over to the open crate containing both chocolate and cocaine.

_ Please make sure you eat the chocolate and not the cocaine. _

Venom snorted.  **“Well, of course. Don’t want to eat cocaine. Poison.”**

_ Good. Just checking. Cocaine sucks. _

**“And how does sweet Eddie know that?”**

_ I uh, had a wild time in my twenties. You know that. _

**“Oh, Eddie.”**

_ Never again. I was so paranoid. _

Venom chuckled.  **“Time for dessert.”** they purred, unwrapping one and curling their tongue around it to draw it into their maw.  **“How decadent. So many brains and now chocolate. We deserve this. We have been ever so good.”**

Eddie agreed. He and Venom’s base instincts had bled together during their symbiosis, which meant that the human now had an inconvenient taste for raw human flesh. He’d never admit that to another person, but he’d  _ really _ missed the kill and feast at the end of a hunt.

Venom opened another bar.

_ Glutton. _

**“Well, that is my favourite of your sins.”**

_ Tied with lust, pride, greed, sloth and wrath. _

**“Well, yes.”** they replied, snapping half the bar away and swallowing it whole.

They ate a few more bars, then stashed another couple generous handfuls within their mass to take home for later. The chocolate would be melted and squashed within their wrappers, but whatever. It would still taste the same. Never turn down free chocolate, especially when it contained a chemical essential for the life of your symbiotic partner.

Then they climbed the stacks of shipping containers to head home. They were very full and feeling sleepy, though only one half of the partnership actually slept. Once the symbiote got out of the dark area around the docks, they blinked. The streetlights seemed very bright. They shook their head and continued a bit further, swinging across the street.

Actually, all the lights seemed very bright, standing out in stark contrast to the velvety darkness of the shadows. If they turned their head too fast, the lights seemed to smear across their vision. Venom shook their head again, their black skin crawling like an uncomfortable cat’s. The weight of brains and chocolate in their gut wasn’t sitting well. It churned.

**“We feel weird.”** Venom rumbled to no one. They slid down the wall into an alley, claws sunk deep into the masonry. The darkness was soothing. But no sooner had they reached the bottom, when their stomach rebelled. Gagging, Venom threw themself over to a dumpster, flipped the lid open and vomited everything they had eaten into the noisome depths of the bin.

They slumped to the filthy floor of the alley, clutching their head. It felt like someone was kneading it like putty. The symbiote retreated back under Eddie’s skin, leaving him sitting there, mouth tasting sickenly of acid, cloyingly sweet sugar and iron.

Eddie gagged again and spat between his legs until he couldn’t muster up any more saliva.

**What’s happening to us?!** his other wailed.

“I think… I think we’ve been drugged.” Eddie managed, blinking furiously. He tried to get up, failed and tried again, this time successfully. He staggered out of the alley.

Oh yeah. The lights were bleeding and throbbing in his vision. Rainbows haloed around them. The street stretching ahead seemed to heave like the ocean.

**Eddie!** Venom cried in panic.  **We are sick! Dying!**

“No… no no no no… I know this feeling.” He looked down at his hands. They were laced in black that dipped in and out of his skin. He was used to that by now, but all of a sudden he was acutely aware of how weird that was. It looked like it should hurt, but all he felt was a pleasant tingling sensation. “Wait. What was I going to say?” he said, tearing his eyes away from his hands and focusing back on the heaving street.

**You know this?**

“Yeah. Yeah, um, I think… I think one of the dudes we ate had mushrooms on him. Maybe LSD.”

**What? Mushrooms don’t do this to us. We had mushrooms on pizza yesterday.**

“No… there are, uh, some mushrooms that make you hallucinate. I’ve done this before, on purpose, when I was younger. It was fun sometimes.”

Venom shifted under his skin. How did they all fit inside him? For a moment, Eddie felt like nothing more than a husk for the ancient alien that lived in his body.  **So… We’re tripping balls?**

“Yup.”

Eddie wobbled. It was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other. The last time he had done shrooms, they hadn’t kicked in this quickly, but then again, his metabolism was a lot higher now.

He had no idea how much they had inadvertently eaten, but it seemed to be a lot. He couldn’t handle this on his own. He was dreading what might happen if the mushrooms peaked while he was still out on the street. He did  _ not _ want to think what might happen if this spiralled into a bad trip. So the very best thing he could do, was to get to a safe environment with people he trusted.

“Let’s try and get to Anne and Dan’s. We’re not that far away.”

**… Feel sick…**

“I know. Shrooms can do that, but the sick feeling goes away. Anne and Dan can watch us. We won’t feel like this forever. In a few hours, we’ll be okay, love.”

Venom moaned.  **Promise?**

Eddie’s eyes latched onto Anne’s condo. They were so close. It looked like a sleeping giant, one that would be all too happy to eat him up if he disturbed its slumber.

No! That was stupid. He was on drugs. This was all in his head. He fisted his hands in his hair for a moment and shook his head. The brief spike of pain from his scalp cleared his head a tiny bit.

Determined, he staggered towards her front door and promptly tripped over the concrete steps and face-planted into the door with a loud bang.

“Fuck, fuck, shit fuck goddamnit…” Eddie cursed, rolling on the ground and clutching his nose, which was now gushing blood all over his face.

**Eddie! I don’t know how to fix it. I’m too big.** Venom said uncertainly.  **Can’t remember how…** They waved noodly tendrils in front of his face.

Light glowed over him from the window, then the door opened. Anne stood there, upside down to Eddie, disheveled, bleary-eyed from sleep and haloed with the hall light. She looked like an angel.

“Eddie? What the fuck are you doing here? Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“You look like n’angel.” he informed her.

“Honey?” came Dan’s voice, thick with sleep. “What’s going on? You should’ve waited for me.”

She flipped on the front step light. “Oh my god, you’re bleeding!” she exclaimed.

He groaned and blinked at the bright lights.

“Eddie? What are you doing here?!” Dan asked, peering around Anne.

**“We ate a bad person. Bad like spoiled food.”** Venom announced, attempting to form a head. It was sloppy, their eyes on different levels, oozing like molasses.  **“I can’t figure out how to help Eddie.”**

“Please help us.” Eddie said, reaching his bloody hands up.

Without any hesitation, Dan pushed past Anne and knelt beside Eddie. “Can I touch you?” he asked, entering doctor mode.

“What? Sure?”

“What happened?” Dan asked, briskly going over Eddie’s body and checking for more injuries.

“Your face is fuckin’  _ smooth _ . How do you get it like that?” Eddie asked dreamily.

“Eddie, are you on any drugs?”

“Yeah. Annie looks really tall from here. We’re so small, like little ants.” He pinched his fingers together in front of his eyes and squinted. “Teeny.”

“What drugs are you on?”

**“Mushrooms. But not the kind you put in pizza. Turns out there are two kinds. We feel like we are melting.”** Venom replied, using their host’s mouth. The head they had been trying to make did indeed melt, glopping down Eddie’s chest like licorice ice cream.

“Why did you take mushrooms?” Anne asked, appalled.

“We didn’t mean to. Was accidental. Why does my face hurt?”

“You hit it on the door. Okay, let’s get you inside.” Dan said.

“Right. Riiiiighhht…”

“Good idea. I don’t want to have to explain to the neighbors.”

With a grunt, Dan heaved Eddie upright. Heedless of the bloody hand prints now on his sleep shirt, he guided him upstairs and sat him on the edge of the bathtub.

“Grab me the first aid kit?”

“Of course. Be right back.”

More of Venom had oozed out of Eddie’s back. They were inspecting the shampoo bottles with very ginger tendrils, like the colourful plastic bottles were priceless artifacts.

Dan carefully cleaned the blood off Eddie’s face. Eddie’s eyes were glassy and he kept flinching when the washcloth touched his nose.

“It doesn’t look like it’s broken, so that’s good. You’ll probably have at least one black eye if Venom can’t heal you right away. You did split the skin over the bridge of your nose, so I’ll put a bandaid over it, okay?”

“We don’t feel good.”

“Psilocybin does that. You’ll be okay. Let’s get you onto the couch with a bowl, just in case.”

Eddie staggered up, dragging Venom’s tendrils behind him on the floor and flopped onto the couch. He felt like he was sinking into it and flailed. A swinging tentacle knocked over some pictures on a table with a clatter, but he escaped the couch, lying flat on the floor instead.

Dan came back with a bowl. Raising his eyebrows, he asked, “Why are you on the floor?”

As if it was the most logical thing in the world, Eddie replied, “We were going to sink into the couch forever. It’s not right. It’s made out of fuckin’ quicksand.”

**“Quicksand.”**

“Okay.”

“Why do you have that kind of couch? Get a normal one instead.”

Teeth bubbled up out of the pool of symbiote on Eddie’s stomach and snarled at the offending piece of furniture.

Anne came over with a glass of orange juice and placed it on the coffee table beside her ex. “I thought that maybe you could use a drink. How are you feeling, Eddie?”

“Like that feeling like when you dream you're falling and then you wake up suddenly. Except I haven’t reached the bottom yet and it’s fuckin’ dark so I can’t tell if or when it’ll end. But it’s also too bright.”

“Okay then. Dan? Sweetie? How long is it going to take to wear off?”

Dan sighed. “Probably another five or six hours, if he was normal and not bonded to a symbiote.”

Eddie lifted his head. “I can’t be normal. Normal’s boring.”

“What do we do?”

“Let him ride it out and try and keep them both happy. Keep an eye on them. I just want to double check a few things. It’s been a long time since I had to learn any of this and I don’t want to upset them.” He got up and headed to the bedroom to get his phone.

Anne sat on the couch. Immediately, Eddie reached up with both arms and a few tentacles to tug her off the couch.

“The couch is fucked up. The floor is  _ much _ safer.”

With only a small sigh, she settled down Beside Eddie and Venom, arranging her robe around herself.

Eddie relaxed visibly and turned his gaze up to the ceiling, though he still held one of her hands.

Dan came back. He was wearing a clean shirt that wasn’t decorated with blood. “What kind of music do you like?”

Eddie’s face knotted. “How can I  _ pick _ ?! There’s like, too many to choose from. What if I get it wrong?”

“He liked classic rock, metal and alternative when we were dating. I doubt that’s changed. But maybe something a bit softer than most of that.”

“Can do.”

Soon, mellow alternative was playing softly. Venom’s tendrils, which had been investigating the fibers in the rug, were waving in time with the beat.

“Well, if we’re going to be watching him, I might as well get a pot of coffee on.” Anne announced, getting up. “It’s a good thing I don’t have court today.”

“Wish I could say I didn’t have to go in today.” Dan said a tad mournfully. “But I’ve got a teratoma surgery in a few hours.”

Eddie sat bolt upright. “Oh  _ shit _ . We shouldn’t have come here. You got  _ surgery _ . Now we’re here, keeping you up.” He stood up.

“Eddie! Eddie, no!” Anne barked, using that tone of voice that always got him to obey before. “You did the right thing coming here. We don’t mind looking after you.”

**“Promise?”** Venom asked, using Eddie’s mouth as forming something as complex as a head was a bit beyond them at the moment.

“Promise.”

**“Okay. What’s a teratoma?”** They sat back down.

“It’s a non-cancerous tumour. They aren’t very common. I think they’re neat. One of my old teachers had several in jars.” Dan replied.

**“This is in a brain?”**

“Spinal cord. It’s still very small, but it’s pressing on the nerves so it needs to come out before it causes damage. They can happen in the rest of the body and brains too though.”

**“Isn't it weird how humans keep everything they are in their brains?”**

Dan shrugged. “I can’t imagine it otherwise.”

**“I don’t. Klyntar don’t have a central nervous system.”**

“How do you work then?”

The web of black over Eddie’s skin paused in its ceaseless slow movement as Venom struggled to think.  **“I don’t know.”** they admitted.  **“We just do. We can come back just the same from a tiny piece. But humans! All you are is a bag of water, fatty protein and chemicals driving around meat! It’s so** **_weird_ ** **.”**

Dan hid a smile behind his hand. “That’s a little simplistic, but yes.”

**“I don’t know how Eddie doesn’t stay awake at night thinking about that.”**

“Oh  _ shit _ .” Eddie said, the realization hitting him. “V. Why did you have to  _ say _ that?!”

**“Don’t know why you didn’t think about it before. Humans are just complicated chemistry.”**

“Well, you are too. Even if you don’t know the names and processes.  _ I _ think it’s weird that you’re an undifferentiated blob, but you can change your makeup on a whim and form complex structures or change the elasticity and pliability of yourself incredibly quickly.”

“We’re all just chemistry that can think.” Eddie said, eyes fixed blankly at the wall as he tried to wrap his poor drugged brain around the concept.

Anne sat on the arm of Dan’s chair and handed a cup of coffee to him. It was in an oversized smiley face mug. He mouthed thank you at her and wrapped his fingers around it. “If you want to think about something even weirder, if you get down to it, chemistry is just physics. Just electrons and stuff moving around.” He took a deep breath of the fragrant steam.

Both host and symbiote apparently had no way to process that information. Eddie's face was a pizza of confusion.

“I think you broke them.” Anne hissed to Dan as the silence stretched on.

“Oops. Hey, have you had any orange juice yet? It’s tasty.”

Eddie reached over and gingerly took the glass of juice from the table with both hands, still trying to think. He slurped half the glass in short order. “That’s the best orange juice we have ever had.” He slugged back another mouthful. “Where did you get it from?”

“Uh, Whole Foods.”

He snorted. “No way. They don’t have anything this good. Whoever grew these oranges should get a prize.”

**“This is amazing. Normally fruit is not my favourite.”**

Anne and Dan traded looks as Eddie and Venom babbled at each other, increasingly incomprehensibly, about how magical the orange juice was.

“Have you ever seen someone on mushrooms before?” Anne asked.

“Oh yeah.” Dan replied. “It happened a bunch in university. This is pretty tame in comparison. This one guy dosed himself up, had a bad trip and ended up locking himself, butt-naked, out of his dorm room.”

“Huh. I guess I wasn’t in one of the cool cliques. I didn’t go to many parties in law school. I was too busy. So how on earth did  _ you _ manage to go to any?”

Dan shrugged and sipped his coffee. “I didn't go to that many. The freak-out was pretty public and it happened at two pm on a Tuesday. I did LSD once though.”

Anne choked on her own coffee. Coughing, she spluttered, “You  _ didn’t _ .”

“I did.” He hid a small smile.

“ _ How _ ? Weren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?”

“Well, I got it from one of my classmates. She was a chemistry whiz and made a batch. She’d sell it at parties to help pay for her textbooks. I trusted her and I was curious, so I thought why not? All the psychology students raved about it, so it must be interesting.”

Fascinated, Anne leaned closer, still watching her ex and his gooey bodymate. “What was it like?”

“It was one of the most mind-expanding experiences I’ve ever had. It cemented my desire to become a surgeon. Just… The human body is such a fascinating machine and I don’t know how we can ever possibly understand all the intricacies, but when something happens that stops that machine from working as it should… I want to try and fix it.”

“Wow.” she breathed and leaned harder on her boyfriend. She kissed the top of his head.

For a while, Eddie and Venom were happy to just lie on the floor and listen to music. Now that he was in a safe place and he’d forgotten his wounded nose, he could just relax and enjoy the trip. Whatever the dose they had taken, it was a lot higher than anything he’d had before. He’d gotten light streaks and watched textures distort on his previous trips, but this time he was seeing full-on colours blooming in the air in tune with the music.

The textured ceiling above them was  _ fascinating _ . It seemed to slowly ripple in fractals. Eddie knew, logically, that the ceiling was just your basic run-of-the-mill white popcorn ceiling, but he could see other colours  _ underneath _ the white. It was purple and pink and the edges of the fractals were pastel rainbow.

His awareness of his own body and Venom faded. The floor was incredibly comfortable. Eddie couldn't really feel his own body. He seemed to be a disembodied mind staring at the ceiling. If he closed his eyes, the most wonderful colours and patterns gyrated in his mind's eye.

A feeling of great peace and well-being suffused through Eddie and his other.

Venom was happy, he was happy. They just lay there, filled with love, existing in a never-ending moment.

Until...

**Hungry.** Venom rumbled.

Eddie realized that they  _ were _ hungry. It was a welcome change from the nausea that had plagued the early part of their trip. He also realized that he wasn't tripping nearly as hard as before. He was coming back to himself.

For a quite a while, or maybe only a few minutes, (He had no idea right now…) he and Venom had kind of blended together. They had been closer than any time before, nearly one mind. It was both terrifying and wonderful. Now they were closer to their normal level of symbiosis.

**Hungry!** Venom said again, more insistently.

"Okay, okay. Just shhh, we gotta be quiet. See?" he replied to his other, pushing himself into a sitting position and pointing at Anne and Dan. They had fallen asleep leaning against each other.

**Aww. They look so sweet.**

Eddie got up, wobbling. He nearly pitched over and was saved at the last minute by Venom anchoring one of their trailing tentacles to the couch. He was winched back upright.

He giggled, imagining what that looked like. "Thanks, love." he whispered. Apparently his balance was still shot.

Getting over to the kitchen was a slow endeavor. Just because he was tripping less didn't mean everything was back to normal. The floor never seemed to be at the same depth. It rippled like the sea. He was sure that without Venom, he'd be crawling to the tidy kitchen.

**What do they have? Tater tots?** Venom asked hopefully as Eddie slid open the freezer drawer.

He squinted at the contents. Neatly labeled plastic containers met his eye. 'Puttanesca sauce' and 'chicken stock' and 'veggie chili'. Oh my. There were bags of frozen fruit and peas and some questionable low-cal pre-packaged microwavable meals. No frozen potatoes in any form. And nothing that appealed.

He grimaced and slid it closed with exaggerated care.

"What do we want to eat?"

**Food. Meat?** Venom wound a tendril around the fridge door handles and pulled the doors open. It was fairly sparse, but a different kind of sparse than their own fridge. Anne and Dan had fancy condiments and pickles, a bottle of kombucha and a carton of oat milk, plus a few other things. It was the fridge of busy people nearing grocery day, unlike their own which was mostly empty because they had a prodigious appetite and weren't great at cooking. They got a lot of take out.

Eddie did find part of a block of cheddar and shucked off the plastic bag in record time, biting off a chunk. It at least had protein.

Once he finished that, he smacked his lips. The cheese was delicious, but his mouth felt very dry. There was still orange juice left, so he tipped the carton back, chugging like a college student late to a party. Juice dribbled from the corners of his mouth, leaving sticky trails to his collar.

A tongue grew out of his skin, licking up the spilled juice. He shivered.

**That was good. Want more though.** Venom stated as Eddie caught his breath.

The carton and cheese bag were left on the counter as they started searching through cupboards. Someone had reorganized since Eddie had lived there, which was very rude. He opened the snack cupboard and instead found mixing bowls.

Then, in what used to be the pan cupboard, he found a package of mixed nuts. He opened it, rummaged around for a handful and was about to cram them in his mouth when he froze. He was holding bugs, just masses of cockroaches in various shades of brown.

With a choked sound of disgust, he threw the handful down and flung the bag onto the counter. Nuts clacked and rattled, bouncing away.

**What's wrong?**

"Bugs!" he hissed. "It was bugs!"

Confusion rippled through their bond. One of the tendrils twining around him lifted up and wrapped around a Brazil nut.

**Feels fine.**

Eddie seized the rope of black and held it in front of his eyes. After careful inspection, it was indeed just a nut.

"I thought… it was cockroaches a second ago."

**Didn't feel cockroaches. Would have known. Cockroaches are crunchy.** They enveloped the nut and dissolved it, breaking it down to fats, protein and other nutrients.

"I don't… I don't want to eat them. Let's find something else. Didn't you see them? I could have sworn…"

**No. Not using your eyes right now. Everything looks too weird. Distracting. It's enough just feeling everything right now.**

"Well, I want something else."

**_Fine…_ **

He rooted around in the cupboards again, finally unearthing a box of Captain Crunch. It was a secret vice of Anne's. It had been her favourite when she was a kid and she kept some for when she wanted a nostalgic breakfast.

Dumping the entire box into a mixing bowl, he walked back to the fridge. The oat milk would have to do.

He took the giant bowl of cereal into the hall closet and sat back under the coats. Venom pushed the shoes aside. It was too bright in the living room and faint colours still bloomed in the air from the music. It was way too distracting.

"Much better."

**Shhh. No talking. Eat.**

Anne blinked. The early morning sun was shining through the curtains directly on her face. She pushed herself upright and grimaced. Her back did  _ not _ like being treated like that. Dan was still slumped over, snoring softly.

God, what time was it?

She craned her head and squinted at the clock. Only a half an hour past her alarm, which wasn't a big deal. She always got up with plenty of time since she hated rushing in the morning. Dan was the same way. Music was still playing, which was why she hadn't heard her alarm going off from the bedroom.

Right. Eddie. Setting her lips into a thin line, she looked around for her wayward ex. He wasn't on the floor where she'd left him.

Anne got up and looked around. He wasn't in the living room at all. The kitchen revealed empty food wrappers on the counter and a bag of nuts spilled all over the floor and counter but no Eddie.

She rushed into the living room, stepping on a walnut as she went. She cursed and hopped, brushing off her foot.

"Dan! Dan, wake up! I can't find Eddie!"

"What?" he said muzzily, stretching with audible popping from his joints.

"He's gone!"

"What? Where would he go? What time is it?"

"Just after six. I have no idea where he'd go. I can't believe we fell asleep!"

Dan got up. "I'm sure he's fine. He was pretty mellow there."

"You don't know him like I do. He gets ideas…"

They checked over the living room again, then their bedroom and the guest room. Everything was as they left it.

As Anne dressed frantically, Dan called her out of their room.

"What?" she said, a little too harshly.

"I found them." Dan pointed. Eddie's feet and three tentacles, idly twitching, were protruding from the hall closet door. Snoring inside was Eddie, none the worse for wear from his adventure during the night.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[art] for It Takes a Luminescent View](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29568489) by [OldToad_art (OldToadWoman)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldToadWoman/pseuds/OldToad_art)




End file.
